“Is it safe?”
Swift shot: Marathon Man will have you wondering where the grit went over thirty years of film-making. This film bleeds angst and delivers drama and real suspense. Several times throughout the film I had to take a breather and say, Holy Shit that was awesome! I can’t believe I never bothered to watch this one before. John Schlesinger directed, Robert Evans produced and starred three legends of the small screen, need I say more?
I was two when this film came out, and I just never got around to seeing it, and man, was I missing out! This film is amazing, with an all-star cast and a great screenplay that keeps you actively involved throughout. Marathon Man’s true claim to fame would have to be the immersion factor, everything feels so damned real – and while it was released in 1976, it could easily apply today. Concept is simple, Nazi war-criminal Szell (Sir Laurence Olivier) has to come out of hiding to retrieve ill-gotten diamonds, graduate student, Babe (Dustin Hoffman) and his brother, Doc (Roy Scheider) get caught up in the affair and the rest is just buckle up and enjoy. What else do you need to know about the plot anyway? It has Nazis, treasure and spies, oh my!!
The FBI likes to say crime doesn’t happen in a vacuum – people bleed, people leave trails of their lives everywhere. Marathon Man leaves trails of blood, sweat and tears throughout this battlefield of cinematic gold. You will feel everything the characters do, the pain is visceral and translates well for any era’s audience – incredibly well done! I’d call this the Old Boy of its time, complete with a disturbing torture scene that original audience members fled the theater because it was too intense for its time. I’ll grant you the scene wasn’t as graphic as Old Boy, not by any stretch of the imagination, but incredibly effective!
While there may have been some obvious spy thriller cliches tucked in a few scenes, the whole film doesn’t suffer as one big cliche and even leaves some loose ends flapping in the wind – but for some reason it won’t bother you. Hard to explain without giving away things, but, suffice to say . . . our hero has some family issues that never get resolved to my liking.
Marathon Man never appealed to me, on the surface, because of the title. There was another 1970s film about an actual marathon runner that I saw when I was a kid that bored me to tears. So, please, don’t let the title of this one sway you from seeing it. It is a suspense thriller and had NOTHING to do with running.
When everything is finally revealed, you will have a new understanding of the levels of human indecency, greed and corruption. Excellent cinematography throughout, layered angles, very few cheesy effects – which I hated about some 1970s films, and is why I typically avoid them like the black death. The only thing that didn’t work right was the dubbing, the audio wasn’t synching right and it will be painfully obvious in certain scenes, which of course has that detraction of immersion effect to it.
All in all, I am pissed at myself for not catching this one sooner. You gotta watch this one if you want to see some of the best acting on the small screen, ever and some amazing camera play.
